A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.
Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.
As far as I know, the ban on skyscrapers is due to safety concerns and a sense of identity which make sense, vertical urban planning is good but the best middle point is buildings that are neither too small (because you are not taking advantage of the vertical space) nor too tall. This is not much different from US zoning laws, which work to appease to the car industry lobbyists.
Regarding subway lines, I can’t find any information about that, just that they banned drinking in such places.
Here is an article in 2018 about China making it harder to build new mass transit:
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-07-14/china-makes-it-harder-to-get-ok-to-build-subways-light-rail-101302749.html
Here is an article in 2021 about China effectively no longer building subway lines in cities without an existing system, mainly due to trying to corral the real estate bubble:
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008813
The Chinese national and regional governments don’t operate on the same economics or politics of Western governments, so the actions of one may not fully map to the actions of another.